Combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma to Democratize Entry to Properly-governed Information
At a Look
- North, a number one funds answer supplier processing over $100 billion in annual transactions, aimed to enhance knowledge discovery and governance atop their Snowflake- and Sigma-powered trendy knowledge stack
- Adopting Atlan as their energetic metadata platform, North has since achieved end-to-end visibility of 225,000 knowledge property, securing delicate knowledge, and rising adoption of self-service analytics
- In lower than a 12 months, their crew is projecting $1.4mm in annual effectivity features and a 200% progress in Sigma adoption whereas realizing a 700% improve in tagged Snowflake property which has contributed to mitigating hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in threat
For over 30 years, North has established itself as a number one funds answer supplier, now processing over $100 billion in transactions yearly. With a various portfolio of over 20 manufacturers and subsidiaries, they help a broad vary of fee wants, supporting brick-and-mortar and on-line shops by means of fee gateways, cell options, and extra. Dedicated to serving industries that span eating places to authorities entities, North goals to be the best end-to-end funds supplier to do enterprise with.
With an unlimited knowledge property comprising 225,000 property, totaling 41 terabytes on Snowflake, the duty of managing and governing North’s knowledge belongs to Daniel Dowdy, Vice President of Information Analytics & Governance, serving for 13 years on the firm. Becoming a member of Atlan at Snowflake Summit 2024, Daniel shared his crew’s journey, constructing and governing a contemporary knowledge stack that helps each inside knowledge shoppers and their flagship merchandise.
What do 20 subsidiaries and types, and 100,000+ retailers, imply for our crew? It means we have now lots of knowledge. We use that knowledge to help a few of our hottest merchandise.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North’s flagship choices, Payanywhere and Funds Hub, equip retailers with something from {hardware} and software program, to safe on-line portals, simplifying the complexities of funds for retailers.
Funds Hub, a complete funds and operations platform, serves as a command middle for every thing from transaction monitoring and reporting to stock administration and fraud safety. To ship vital, transaction-level reporting to their clients, North depends on Snowflake.
“We make the most of Snowflake for each of those on the backend to supply close to real-time reporting and transaction-level reporting to our clients,” Daniel shared. “With out Snowflake, this simply wouldn’t be doable.”
Earlier than Snowflake, Information Silos
Earlier than Snowflake, North struggled with unchecked and unclear knowledge. Easy duties like pulling uncooked knowledge or producing reviews may take days and even weeks, hindered by ETL bottlenecks and knowledge silos scattered throughout a number of servers and databases, or Excel information circulated throughout the group.
As soon as a file goes out, that knowledge is already stale. To not point out that when that file leaves you, customers can then modify it and make their very own supply of reality. So, you’re scuffling with a number of sources of the reality.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
The shortage of a single supply of reality sophisticated efforts to drive belief in North’s knowledge, and with out clear lineage and governance, controlling that knowledge as soon as it left their arms proved troublesome.
After Snowflake + Sigma, Correct, Actual-time Information
In 2019, North adopted Snowflake as their enterprise knowledge lake, considerably bettering their knowledge science, analytics, and reporting capabilities. By shifting from outdated batch processing to real-time CDC options, their crew traded cumbersome ETL workflows and embraced the effectivity of contemporary ELT processes.
“We went from a ‘Information Desert,’ the place retrieving data took days, to an oasis the place knowledge was accessible in actual time, and we may question it in seconds,” stated Daniel.
Whereas Snowflake represented a big leap ahead within the availability and reliability of knowledge, Daniel’s crew have been nonetheless liable for fielding easy requests for knowledge entry. To cut back this workload, and to make knowledge much more accessible to a rising variety of shoppers, their crew launched Sigma, a enterprise intelligence software that empowers customers to independently entry, analyze, and visualize knowledge, providing essential data in a self-service method.
With its acquainted, Excel-like interface, enterprise customers shortly embraced Sigma, leading to a skyrocketing adoption price, with annual person progress now exceeding 200%.
Starting with 10 customers in 2019, we now have over 350 customers in Sigma, with an annual progress price of greater than 200% year-over-year. Now, Sigma is our self-service analytics platform, and it’s taken lots of burden off our knowledge crew.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
North has since engineered a contemporary knowledge stack, organising sturdy pipelines that seamlessly ingest and replicate knowledge from numerous sources like Oracle, MySQL, Salesforce, and S3. This wealth of knowledge is then channeled into highly effective instruments similar to Qlik, Snowpipe, and Kafka, all converging inside Snowflake.
As the amount and number of knowledge grew, so did the demand for entry, shifting the problem from mere knowledge accessibility to the extra advanced points of knowledge governance and discovery.
“What grew to become the issue was methods to discover the info, and methods to govern it properly,” Daniel shared. “Atlan grew to become the central level addressing all of those issues.”
Unlocking Snowflake and Sigma with Atlan
Connecting to over 225,000 knowledge property inside Snowflake and Sigma took simply hours with Atlan, driving unprecedented visibility on a big scale.
“After partnering with Atlan, it took most likely a few hours earlier than we have been built-in with Snowflake and Sigma, connecting to over 225,000 property. We’re so proud of the outcomes,” Daniel shared.
This near-instant connection reworked knowledge discovery at North, as soon as a chaotic expertise of leaping by means of a number of silos, all of a sudden making it easy to navigate and perceive their knowledge property.
Atlan began getting us this speedy worth by means of knowledge discovery. The best way I preserve occupied with it was the early days of the web. You had entry to this huge quantity of data, nevertheless it was actually exhausting to search out. Then, engines like google made it simple to run a search and discover related content material. For us, Atlan grew to become Google for Information.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Transferring past easy knowledge discovery, Daniel’s crew launched knowledge glossaries, definitions, and complete phrases, enabling deeper dives into knowledge, and using lineage to know upstream and downstream dependencies with ease.
With this beneficial context unlocked, their subsequent step was to ship it on to enterprise customers, who primarily devour knowledge throughout the Sigma, with out switching to different instruments.
“That’s the place Atlan’s Chrome Extension grew to become a game-changer,” Daniel shared.
Atlan’s Chrome Extension reworked knowledge consumption inside Sigma. With context about their knowledge property—dashboard descriptions, knowledge definitions, tags, lineage, notifications, and upstream high quality indicators—now accessible instantly in Sigma, customers not needed to soar between instruments to perform their duties.
Obtainable in a sidebar, Atlan’s Chrome Extension made this data immediately accessible, with out coaching or change administration.
“The initiative required no coaching,” Daniel defined. “As a result of it’s a sidebar and intuitively reveals this data, we might simply add it, then customers have been mechanically up and operating, bettering their effectivity, and instantly seeing the profit.”
Situation Decision for Engineers and Shoppers, Alike
With context about their knowledge property made accessible in Sigma, Daniel and his crew started work to enhance the method of troubleshooting and speaking points associated to those property. Upon receiving a ticket, North’s engineering crew as soon as spent vital time looking by means of Sigma to determine the property referenced within the request. And not using a direct hyperlink between tickets and these property, decision would typically be delayed, and work can be duplicated.
“It was actually inefficient,” Daniel shared. “Typically even the identical engineers can be engaged on the identical venture, they usually didn’t even understand it as a result of a number of tickets have been submitted by a number of folks.”
By integrating the Atlan Chrome Extension with Jira and Slack, North’s knowledge shoppers may increase points instantly of their software of alternative, with a hyperlink to particular property included mechanically, permitting Information Engineers to know when and the place points occurred.
For knowledge shoppers in Sigma, this integration provided a complete historical past of all Jira tickets and Slack conversations regarding particular knowledge property, and for engineers, a method of stopping duplicate tickets or a number of engineers engaged on the identical concern, and time financial savings by higher understanding comparable, previous points.
Eliminating duplicate work, or eliminating your engineers engaged on the identical venture with out understanding about it? These effectivity features are enormous, and the financial savings add up actually shortly.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Introducing Snowflake Dynamic Information Masking
As a funds answer supplier, North handles huge quantities of delicate monetary knowledge. Whereas enhancements in knowledge discovery and enrichment are essential, Daniel’s crew realized the worth of those enhancements can be restricted to a small variety of trusted customers with out sturdy knowledge governance and documentation securing these property.
To safe delicate knowledge and implement stringent entry insurance policies, North’s knowledge crew selected to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking with Snowflake, providing complete column-level masking for delicate knowledge, and policy-based management for customers.
With the intention to make the most of Dynamic Information Masking, Daniel and his crew started the method of figuring out particular knowledge property that these insurance policies would apply to. Given the dimensions and complexity of their knowledge panorama, they acknowledged {that a} granular, asset-by-asset method can be not solely time-consuming, however probably error-prone. Trying to find a approach to determine and safe these property programmatically, Daniel turned to Atlan.
“How do you discover and tag 1000’s of property? You don’t Google it, you Atlan it. It’s actually easy,” Daniel defined.
Governing Hundreds of Property, on the Click on of a Button
Reasonably than painstakingly finding these property, then tagging them one-by-one, their crew utilized Atlan Playbooks, rules-based bulk automations that might determine 1000’s of property based mostly on chosen standards, then mechanically apply actions, similar to including chosen tags and insurance policies.
By the point I added a filter, Atlan scanned our 225,000 property and nearly instantly discovered 45 matches. As I modified the filters so as to add new ones, it consistently up to date to point out me what number of property meet that standards. Hours of handbook analysis and testing, earlier than Atlan, was transformed into a pair seconds.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Shortly figuring out 1000’s of property to better-secure, Daniel’s crew used Playbooks to construct workflows that might mechanically apply the proper tag to the proper asset, then propagate that tag upstream, on the click on of a button. Then, with Atlan’s Two-way Tag Sync, these tags would function the inspiration for Dynamic Information Masking at North, mechanically making use of masking insurance policies based mostly on how and from whom knowledge was queried.
By combining Atlan Playbooks, Two-way Tag Sync, and Automated Lineage with Snowflake Dynamic Information Masking, North efficiently ruled 1000’s of knowledge property in document time with a programmatic method, avoiding the painstaking work of figuring out, tagging, and recording insurance policies one-by-one throughout a 225,000-asset panorama.
With out Atlan tracing upstream and downstream, serving to us perceive potential publicity and implement insurance policies, this course of would have been sophisticated and really handbook. However with Atlan, you can’t solely hint knowledge lineage and arrange the complexity, however you possibly can see reputation and utilization metrics that assist prioritize the place efforts are wanted essentially the most, or the place the largest impression might be made.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
By means of this programmatic method, Daniel’s crew affected a 700% improve in tagged property, considerably bettering their safety and compliance, and paving the best way for a big improve within the variety of their colleagues trusted to make use of knowledge.
“We’ve used Atlan to spice up the velocity and accuracy of our asset tagging by greater than 700% since implementation,” Daniel shared. “With the flexibility to find knowledge quicker, apply tags, and reverse sync that knowledge again into Snowflake, we added greater than 2,000 governance property in underneath a 12 months. That’s simply the tip of the iceberg.”
Hundreds of thousands in Worth, in Months
In lower than one 12 months of being outfitted with Atlan, Daniel and his crew reworked the best way North makes use of and governs its knowledge, unlocking the potential for hundreds of thousands in worth by means of effectivity features, price reductions, and enhanced threat mitigation.
By thoughtfully converging essential context about Snowflake and Sigma right into a user-friendly data base in Atlan, North’s technical and enterprise customers are projecting financial savings of $1.4 million per 12 months in effort by means of accelerated knowledge discovery and lowered effort understanding lineage.
“That’s $1.4 million of duplicate work, handbook and tedious analysis. That’s time we will now spend on altering issues, versus attempting to navigate knowledge prefer it’s the web in 1997,” Daniel shared.
And with built-in insights in Atlan, close to–immediately figuring out pointless spend of their Snowflake atmosphere, Daniel and his crew estimate an annual price financial savings of greater than $20,000 by deprecating greater than 10,000 idle property and inefficient queries.
“That financial savings was mainly handed to us on a silver platter with no further work,” Daniel remarked.
Past price financial savings and effectivity features, and existential to an organization that processes delicate monetary knowledge, lies vital threat mitigation. By rising their tagged property by 700%, shortly and in bulk, North’s governance and safety improved nearly in a single day, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in lowered threat.
We’ve been in a position to scale back our threat and publicity by hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
A 200% Enhance in Self-service Analytics, with Room to Develop
Whereas these enhancements are spectacular, whether or not in knowledge discovery, with context about their knowledge property supporting a 200% year-over-year improve in self-service analytics adoption, or in Information Governance, driving hundreds of thousands in threat mitigation, it’s the mixture of those applications that’s set to remodel the best way North makes use of knowledge.
By affecting a leap ahead in the best way that North manages entry management and ensures safety throughout an enormous knowledge property, the best way Daniel’s crew defines a trusted person of knowledge is evolving and increasing considerably.
“Information Governance gave us the arrogance to soundly and securely share extra knowledge in Sigma,” Daniel defined.Now assured that essentially the most delicate knowledge is safe, appropriately tagged, and ruled by the proper entry coverage, North can confidently supply knowledge and self-service analytics capabilities to extra enterprise customers than ever earlier than, enhancing the already vital worth they’ve yielded from combining Atlan, Snowflake, and Sigma.
We have been in a state of near-paralysis attempting to manually decide who ought to see what. Using a mixture of improved governance insurance policies, tags, and dynamic knowledge masking, we have been in a position to make use of knowledge with confidence. Because of the enhanced person expertise, mixed with the elevated knowledge availability, we count on to proceed or exceed our self-service atmosphere progress charges.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Mere years after adopting Snowflake as the inspiration of their Fashionable Information Stack, and fewer than a 12 months after adopting Atlan, North’s knowledge property has reworked from, as Daniel described, a “Information Desert” into an “Oasis.”
“Because the knowledge by no means leaves our umbrella, there’s no extra flat information which are shared,” Daniel defined. “There’s no extra a number of variations of the reality, and our knowledge has a stage of confidence, leading to quicker and extra knowledgeable selections.”
Regardless of the unimaginable accomplishments of North’s knowledge crew, constructing self-service analytics and Information Governance capabilities from scratch in document time, Daniel believes there’s nonetheless a lot extra to perform.
Within the months and years to come back, their knowledge crew is keen to make use of Atlan AI to simplify advanced queries into pure language, and speed up the enrichment of their knowledge property. And by supporting a rising variety of Information Stewards to independently share and doc data, a extra knowledgeable and empowered group of enterprise customers is rising.
Reflecting on their journey with Atlan, Daniel emphasised that past the proper know-how, crew, and technique lies an important aspect: The best partnership.
One of the crucial vital issues about Atlan has been the folks. They’re knowledge folks that have labored within the business, perceive what you’re going by means of, and perceive what you’re speaking about from the second you begin the dialog.”
Daniel Dowdy, Vice President, Information Analytics & Governance
Photograph by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
